Best Rust Server Settings for Community Servers in 2026

So you want to run a community Rust server. Not an official wipe-every-hour meatgrinder, not a solo server for you and three mates – an actual public server with a name, a Discord, and people who show up week after week. This is the stuff I wish someone had told me before I started tweaking ConVars at 2am.

A quick note on what I mean by "community server" here: anything you run yourself that isn't a Facepunch official. Vanilla, 2x, PvE, heavy modded – they all live under that umbrella, and the right settings depend entirely on which flavour you're building.

Picking your server style

Before you touch a config file, pick a lane. The Rust server browser has four tabs – Modded, Community, Vanilla, and Official – and which one your server appears in is not a setting called "identity". It's driven by two things: whether you've got Oxide or Carbon loaded, and what you put in server.tags.

Stock Rust with nothing loaded and no weird rates will show up under Vanilla or Community depending on your tags. The moment you drop Oxide or Carbon into the install and load a plugin that touches gameplay, you're in Modded territory whether you wanted to be or not. Don't fight it – if you're running GatherManager you belong in Modded, and that's where players looking for 2x rates are going to find you anyway.

The practical styles I'd bucket people into:

• Vanilla community – stock rates, stock everything, just better admins than official. Attracts purists.
• Lightly modded – 1.5x to 2x rates, a handful of QoL plugins like /home and kits. This is the biggest category by a mile.
• Heavy modded – 3x+, shop, events, backpacks, the works. Fast progression, fast wipes.
• PvE / build – no raiding, soft decay, people are here to make art not to eat rockets.

Pick one and set expectations in server.description. Nothing kills retention faster than a player joining what they thought was a chill PvE server and getting C4'd at 3am.

Map size and seed

I'm not going to give you a precise table because the "right" world size depends on how much your players like running. Rough shape of it: 3000 is cosy, 3500–4000 is the boring-but-correct answer for most servers, 4500+ starts feeling empty unless you're pushing 200 players. The default server.worldsize 4000 is genuinely fine.

Seed matters more than size. Don't just mash the keyboard – plug your seed and size into rustmaps.com and actually look at it. I'm checking for monument spread (launch site in a corner ruins the map), a decent amount of coastline, and that the river network doesn't carve the map into two unconnected halves. Takes two minutes and saves you a wipe's worth of complaints.

Gather rates, crafting, day/night – the plugin territory

Here's where I have to correct a lot of old guides floating around: in modern Rust, most of the "fun" rate tuning isn't done through ConVars anymore. The dotted-form gather.rate.* syntax you see in old blog posts isn't really a thing – what still exists is a gather.rate console command with arguments, but it's fiddly and not persistent in a way you'd want for a real server.

The sane answer is GatherManager (uMod, by Mughisi originally, still maintained). Drop it in, edit the JSON, and you get per-resource rates – 2x wood, 1.5x stone, 3x sulfur, whatever economy you want. Same story for crafting speed: that's plugin territory, not a ConVar.

Day/night length is the same deal. The old env.daylength / env.nightlength ConVars got removed from base Rust a long time ago. If you want longer days or shorter nights, you're looking at a plugin like TimeOfDay or Night Skipper, or the very popular SkipNightVote which lets players vote to jump to dawn.

Basically: if you want to change rates, craft times, or the clock, install a plugin. Don't waste an afternoon hunting for a ConVar that doesn't exist.

Wipes

Facepunch forces a map wipe on the first Thursday of every month. You cannot opt out of that one. They also occasionally force blueprint wipes alongside it, usually tied to big updates. Anything more frequent than monthly – weekly, biweekly, twice-weekly – is entirely your call.

My rough rule: the higher your rates, the more often you should wipe. A 5x server going four weeks without a wipe will be a ghost town by week two because everyone has everything. A vanilla server wiping weekly is cruel. Biweekly on Thursdays is the boring-correct answer for most 2x servers.

Team size

relationshipmanager.maxteamsize 6

That's the real ConVar – the relationshipmanager. prefix matters, and you'll see old guides drop it, which just silently does nothing. Default is 8, which is fine if you want stock Rust. I run 6 on community servers because it cuts down on the "one clan owns the map" problem without making duos and trios feel squeezed. Set it to 0 to disable teams entirely – brutal, but some no-alliance servers swear by it.

Decay

Default upkeep is fine for the vast majority of servers. If you want to be a bit kinder to people who can only log in a couple of times a week, decay.scale 0.5 halves the rate and tends to make casuals happy without turning the map into an abandoned base museum. decay.scale 0 turns it off entirely – only do that on PvE servers that wipe regularly, otherwise entity counts climb and your tick rate tanks.

Leave decay.upkeep_period_minutes alone. The default 1440 (24 hours) is what players expect.

EAC stays on

server.secure true

That's it. Don't turn it off. I don't care what the reason is. A community server without EAC is a cheater server with extra steps, and you will lose your regulars within a week.

The plugins I actually install

Most of these run on either uMod/Oxide or Carbon – Carbon is a newer Oxide-compatible framework that's been gaining traction, and it runs the same .cs plugin files, so you're not locked in.

• GatherManager (Mughisi, uMod) – per-resource rate control, as mentioned above.
• NTeleportation (nivex) – /home, /tpr, /town. The single most requested feature on any modded server.
• Kits (k1lly0u) – starter kits, VIP kits, cooldown-based kits.
• BetterChat (LaserHydra) – chat formatting, colours, group prefixes. Makes your Discord admins look professional.
• Clans (k1lly0u) – proper clan tags and management, pairs nicely with BetterChat.
• AutoDoors (bushhy) – auto-closing doors. Saves a thousand raids.
• SignArtist (Whispers88) – load images from URLs onto signs and frames.
• RemoverTool (Tryhard) – lets players remove their own building blocks within a grace period. Ends the "I misplaced a wall" support tickets.
• QuickSmelt (misticos) – faster furnaces and refineries. Pairs well with boosted gather.
• SkipNightVote (k1lly0u) – vote-to-skip-night. Does what it says.

Example server.cfg – light community

Vanilla ConVars only. Anything rate-related lives in the GatherManager config, not here.

server.hostname "[EU] My Community | 2x | Biweekly | Kits | Active Admins"
server.description "Biweekly wipes on Thursdays. 2x rates via GatherManager. Discord in /info."
server.url "https://discord.gg/example"
server.headerimage "https://example.com/header.jpg"
server.tags "biweekly,modded,EU"
server.maxplayers 150
server.worldsize 4000
server.seed 1337
server.secure true
server.pve false
server.radiation true
server.stability true
server.encryption 2
server.saveinterval 300

relationshipmanager.maxteamsize 6
decay.scale 1.0

fps.limit 256

rcon.port 28017
rcon.web 1

Fill in rcon.password via your panel's Commandline Manager rather than committing it to the config – you really don't want that in a file you might share.

Where to read next

• Rust server settings guide – the reference I keep going back to for ConVar meanings.
• Top Rust Oxide plugins – longer write-ups on each of the plugins above.
• How to host a Rust dedicated server – if you haven't actually got the server running yet, start there.

If you'd rather skip the "building a box under your desk" part, we run Rust on LOW.MS game server hosting with all the above panel tools – Configuration Files, Mod Manager, Commandline Manager, Scheduled Tasks, Cloud Backup – ready to go out of the box.